Dilapidated railings and caution tape give a messy appearance to Ledbury Park, a once-acclaimed architectural site in North Toronto.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
Ledbury Park is a mess. For two years, the pool and rink at this park in North Toronto went through major repairs. Yet on a recent afternoon, the reflecting pool was filled with trash and leaves and lined by yellow caution tape. Wood railings and plywood ceiling panels were rotten and crumbling.
Along with the disorder is a more subtle form of decay: A nationally significant work of architecture has been mutilated.
This is a typical story of public works in Toronto. Things fall apart; work is done piecemeal and too late; anything special is doomed to be ruined.
Ledbury Park, shown in the 1990s and on a fall day in 2010, has seen better days.James Dow/Shim-Sutcliffe; Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
The complex was designed by Shim-Sutcliffe Architects, and won them a Governor-General’s Medal in Architecture in 1999. In the mid-nineties, Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe were thirtysomething architects with day jobs. A young civil servant, Derek Nicholson, hired them on for Ledbury, and they made this ordinary pool-and-rink project a sensory feast.
From the park entrance, you moved west across a weathering steel bridge; underneath it, a long, narrow skating rink ran 300 feet to the north. This served in summer as a reflecting pool. At the far side of the bridge was a brick courtyard, an elegant service building and then, just ahead to the west, a swimming pool and waterplay area cradled by low red-brick walls. A decorative fountain burbled water downhill toward the pool. Long pathways extended out through the park, lined by tall oaks and custom-designed light poles that washed the park with indirect light.
“It was a modest project,” Ms. Shim recalls. “But it was very important for us, and it was very well appreciated by the neighbours at the time.” In The Globe and Mail, Gary Michael Dault called it “a modest masterpiece.” While modest in budget, it was in truth a bit fussy by city standards. It used brick paving stones and custom hardware. It demanded a modest amount of attention and care.
It didn’t get them. After North York was amalgamated into the new City of Toronto in 1998, the park was neglected. The fountain was turned off, the reflecting pool drained. Mr. Nicholson, now a builder, says he has been “shocked” to see the recent state of the park. “When you install wood screens, they need to be replaced every 15 years,” he said. “If you don’t do that routinely, everything becomes much more expensive and complicated.”
The Ledbury Park swimming pool is still there, but the reflecting pool is drained and its fountain fallen into disuse.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
Case in point: In 2020, the city targeted Ledbury for fixes and accessibility improvements including a new elevator. To design this work, it hired a small engineering firm from Mississauga, Peter T. Mitches and Associates. This is like taking your sore feet to an eye doctor’s office. But it reflects the grim reality of public procurement. If your engineering firm has an architect on staff, you have relevant experience, and your fee is cheap, you can win the job. Ms. Shim, who still runs a busy practice in Toronto, never even heard about the Ledbury project.
Mario Pecchia, program manager, capital design and delivery for the city’s Parks, Forestry & Recreation division, says Ledbury was treated like any other “state of good repair” project. In 2024, PFR budgeted a hefty $321.2-million for capital projects but, according to Mr. Pecchia, it has no central list of which parks or facilities require special attention. “We always want to respect the existing design as much as possible,” said Mr. Pecchia. In this case, “When we replaced masonry, we wanted to make sure it matched.”
And the new brick does match the old. But almost every other aspect of Shim-Sutcliffe’s design has been altered in clumsy fashion. A wood-and-steel trellis was removed, “for operational reasons,” Mr. Pecchia explains. A cedar-clad door was replaced by a steel one. And those wooden handrails and screens are still rotting behind caution tape.
Even the accessibility work is a problem. The complex originally had a lift to bring people down a few steps to the rink surface, The recent renovation replaced this with another, slightly larger lift. Like the old one, it violates the city’s 2021 accessibility guidelines because people with disabilities can’t use it independently. Some fix.
In installing that new device, the designers and builders reconstructed the staircase and the fountain. Now an ugly galvanized steel staircase juts out over the fountain. Does this make any sense? Is it the best long-term design solution? Did anyone try to find a better one?
The solutions here are clear enough. The city needs to learn about its own history of public design. Hire a historian. Designate the most important parks and civic buildings as heritage. (Village of Yorkville Park, an internationally significant park that’s being degraded, is a good place to start.) Prioritize. And stop cheaping out on design.
Meanwhile, PFR’s machine keeps moving. According to Mr. Pecchia, Ledbury’s pedestrian bridge is scheduled to be replaced in 2026. Another designer and another builder will take a crack at fixing this place. Hopefully they won’t get to make a bigger mess.
Editor’s note: (Sept. 16, 2024): A previous version of this article incorrectly stated Mario Pecchia's title with Toronto's Parks, Forestry and Recreation division, and incorrectly described him as an engineer. This version has been updated.